There were differences between the all-nighters of a cat burglar and
those of a crimefighter, and Selina was not enjoying them. She had
slept in, that part was the same—better, in fact, in the crisp Irish linen
of Bruce’s bed. But the breakfast tray, the juice would have been
fine, but just the smell of the coffee filled her mouth with a sour
aftertaste. She had drunk entirely too much coffee researching
Pequena. Entirely too much. She could still taste it, and the
idea of tasting more—yuck.

But she did feel the need for some kind of stimulation to convince her
body to start the new day, so she went across the hall to her suite and
began a vigorous workout. It wasn’t caffeine, but it got her blood
pumping (despite a brief interruption from Tim with yet another girl
dilemma, and you really had to wonder if there was just something in the
capes that made the bat boys such a mess with the opposite sex). Then
she opted for a cold shower instead of a hot one, and headed down to the
cave to resume her research on Eduardo Pequena, the chess set he coveted,
and the museum where it was so briefly on display.

She had planned to announce her arrival with a few feline pronouncements
about the inferiority of crimefighter all-nighters, but she heard voices.
Bruce’s but not Tim’s. She had to wonder who he was talking to.
Whoever it was, she couldn’t place their voice until she reached the main
cavern and saw Bruce, fully in costume, and Aquaman looming on the big
viewscreen.

“The childhood impulse to believe in a boogey man,” he said sheepishly.

After the expected greeting from Aquaman and non-committal grunt from
Bruce, she returned to workstation 2 to continue her research on the chess
set. She hadn’t intended to listen to the call, but it did sound
interesting…

“The ancient history of Atlantis is far more civilized than surface
cultures of a similar age,” Aquaman was saying, “but it was not a utopia.
There has been turbulence and conflict, even wars, mostly having to do with
displaced sea life in the early days of expansion.

“And there is one enemy that stands apart from all the others. We
call them the Shadow Deep, a race with coral-black skin, monstrous claws,
opaque eyes, and huge jaws filled with razor-sharp teeth, who live in the
great trenches that line a particular seamount in the North Atlantic.

“The Atlantis Chronicles are not terribly precise about time, but
most of our scholars place the Shadow Deep’s first appearance about
eighteen-hundred years ago. They view light as an invasion, you see,
and they first bubbled up to the ocean floor when our expansion into the
waters above their trenches introduced light into their world for the first
time. They rose to attack us for the intrusion, without any inkling,
it seems, of what it was they were going to attack. They made two
equally repugnant discoveries: they found the people of Atlantis were
sentient beings with a technology equal to their own, and they discovered
color. Viewing light as the ultimate evil, they seemed to view this
notion of color as the ultimate obscenity. These three
elements—Atlantis, light, and color—seem to be linked in their mind in a
most irrational fashion, and a deep hatred developed for all three as if it
was one reprehensible thing. They became consumed with the idea of
eradicating us from the oceans.

“The first war lasted for nearly two hundred years. The Atlantean
people fought long and hard, battling these creatures wherever they
surfaced. The conflicts ranged from minor skirmishes to full-out
battles, with each side losing soldiers by the thousands. Eventually,
the Shadow Deep were defeated, and they retreated back into their trenches.
They have resurfaced on occasion, but each time they are defeated and sent
back to the depths.

“The problem is that they tend to wait centuries before creeping back up,
so several generations have passed between encounters. All that is
left are the stories, fables really. Most of my people scarcely believe the
Shadow Deep exist at all, hence my remark about a boogey man.”

“I see,” Batman said. “Interesting, but as I said, there is no
evidence that the container off Fiji came from under the ocean floor.
I merely listed that among a half-dozen other possibilities. The most
likely, as you know—”

“Is that it came from the surface, yes I agree. Fiji is far from
the Shadow Deep’s territory, and nearly as far from Atlantis. There
would be no reason for them to upset whales anyway. I suppose I am
just a bit alarmist these days. It’s been one thing after another, as
if some cosmic force is keeping me from going home.”

“A diversion?” Batman asked sharply.

“A paranoid man might think that, but no. The oceans are big; it
happens this way sometimes. One thing after another, I’m sure you know
what it’s like. Like now, I have to go all the way down to Fiji to
look for some remnants of this container to follow up on this theory of
yours, so if it is a diversion to keep me from Atlantis, it looks like
you’re a part of it.”

“It’s the only way to get answers, Arthur.”

“Yes, I realize that. I just meant that… never mind. I
appreciate the time you’ve already given this, Bruce. I’ll let you get
back to your case, and I’ll be in touch once I’ve been to Fiji.”

One of the persistent misconceptions about Atlantis is that the name
refers to a domed city on the ocean floor. To sea dwellers, that city
in the Atlantic is Poseidonis, the capital of Atlantis. The word
Atlantis denotes a vast kingdom that extends across the Atlantic into parts
of the Arctic and Indian Oceans and even includes outposts in the Pacific
and southern seas.

Like any society spread over vast distances, there are local variations
and peculiarities of culture. In ancient times, each settlement had
their own oral traditions, histories, and folklore. In the reign of
King Aigaios III, these were compiled into one official history that became
the Atlantis Chronicles. It was, like similar histories, a
royal mess. Scientific fact mingled with old wives tales, legitimate
history with local tall tales. A few mythic fantasies made their way
in, interspersed with folk wisdom for the proper harvesting of kelp and the
construction of city domes. And all of it was slapped together with no
real sense of structure, tone, or internal consistency.

No one seemed to mind the contradictions until two thousand years ago,
when Atlantis went through a social, artistic, and technological
renaissance. Huge advancements were made in the natural and
theoretical sciences, as well as in art, music, mathematics, and literature.
Philosophy came into its own, and with it, a passionate desire to learn the
truth about the central contradiction in the chronicles: had Atlantis begun
as a surface island which sank into the sea, or did it rise from a
collection of like-minded sea-dwellers clustering together for mutual
protection and companionship?

With caution and trepidation, the Atlanteans began making trips to the
surface to find out. They discovered a surface world that was nowhere
near as advanced as Atlantis, technologically or socially. It seemed
mired in an unnatural belief system that linked its science, politics, and
religion, slowing the progress of any to a crawl. Early attempts at
helping the surface world met with disastrous results. In some cases,
the Atlanteans were attacked; in others, they were worshipped as gods.
In the end, it was unofficially decided that interaction with the surface
world would be kept to a minimum, for the land-dwellers’ safety as much as
their own.

That remained the status quo for centuries. Atlanteans noticed
changes to the man-made vessels above their heads, but they took little
interest in the surface world’s advancements until they began dumping the
refuse from it into the seas. Soon, the shallow water near the
coastlines became disgusting, and the inhabitants retreated to the central
oceans. When word reached the palace, the unofficial policy became
law. King Orlen I decreed that all interaction with the surface was
now strictly prohibited.

In the centuries to come, Atlantis would become more insular, focusing on
advancements in her own community instead of looking outward. It was
only within the last century that she began to open herself up again to the
world beyond her domes. Surface technology had progressed to the point
where land-dwellers could bring all the air they needed to plumb the ocean’s
depths as they had once sailed on its surface. Renewed contact was
becoming inevitable. And then, a new king took the throne having such
strong ties to the surface world that he lifted the ban entirely.

Which led to the particular challenge that king’s personal aide faced
this morning…

Selina began to chuckle as soon as the viewscreen went dark.

“Yes, Kitten?” came the ominous gravel.

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s only that… As League nutjobs go, I always
considered Arthur one of the non-fluffheads. Like you.”

“Thank you.”

“Meow. But now he’s bitching about going to Fiji? I mean,
sign me up for that case. Better than being up all night with a pot of
stale coffee and a fuzzy webcam in Istanbul.”

“He’s anxious to get home. Is that so hard to understand?”

“My city,” Selina graveled in her mocking impersonation. “But I see
your point. After the stale coffee, I got to sleep in my own bed last
night. That said, I wouldn’t say no to some sun on the coral coast
when this case is over.”

“Did you make any headway on Paquena or the chess set?”

“Wouldn’t have to be a tropical getaway, you know. I’d settle for a
long weekend on the Gatta.”

“Oracle was working on a feed from the security cameras so you wouldn’t
be stuck with the webcam.”

“Oh come on now, if I solve the Bruce Wayne kidnapping, you don’t think a
little reward is in order?”

“Selina.”

“I’ll wear a bikini.”

“Selina.”

“I have a new one. Leopard spots, all the way around here.”

She gestured, slowly, the edge of her fingers just grazing her chest as
she traced the border of the bikini top. The mental picture this evoked
finally brought about the wordless scowl she’d been waiting for, accentuated
by a barely perceptible stiffening of the muscles just visible through the
eye slits of the cowl… Batman’s tell, the tell which meant victory.
She had, once again, jostled the bat-brain until she jarred loose any
thoughts of crimefighting. That task accomplished, she returned her
attention to the computer screen with a purr.

“Let’s see, I know Barbara sent me something, but I hadn’t bothered to
open it yet. I was just getting settled in while you finished up with
Arthur. Let’s see what we’ve got here…”

Batman’s lip twitched as she typed away at her keyboard, babbling
cheerily:

“Yep, there it is. She cracked eight different datastreams in and
around the museum. You should give that girl a raise. Looks like
a bonanza. Datastream 1 is… ah, it’s the parking lot. Woof.”

She was crimefighting.

“Stream 2… looks like a service entrance. Pfft, who cares?”

In his cave.

“Foyer.”

Just as he’d dreamed it.

“At first I was surprised you hadn’t make more headway this morning.
I knew you’d been up for hours. I guess Arthur’s thing kept you busy?”

And she was still Catwoman.

“Hm, that must be the curator’s office, I think. Hey look, they’ve
still got my picture up!”

Still completely that impossible woman he’d fought on all those rooftops.

“Come on, guys, get over it. You booked a blockbuster exhibit you
did not have the security for, and Kitty picked up the option.”

Of all the things the Post got wrong, of all their absurdities she had
taken offense at, she never seemed to notice the one that most offended him:
their preposterous crimefighter cat had no hint of the vibrant, playful,
sexy woman Catwoman was, no hint of the qualities that made her—

“Well that’s funny.”

Bruce’s train of thought was blasted off the track by a tone of voice and
a formula of words he’d only heard in the laboratory. Cambridge,
twenty-eight months into his years of travel, the Lensfield Road Laboratory,
Dr. Frederick Glen. He’d led Glen to believe his interest was
research, and he had timed his arrival to be placed on the Khimii team.
Two weeks into the analysis of double oxygen bonds in polymers, Glen
mentioned that moments of historic and significant scientific discovery
seldom get a “Eureka.” The more common herald is a silent, crinkled
brow and a barely audible “Well that’s funny.”

It might have been true, it might have been interesting, and it might
have been insightful, but it had no bearing on his Mission. Bruce
therefore filed it in the dustbin of his mind under useless trivia… until
eight years later, when he actually saw it happen during a surprise visit to
the Wayne Aerospace Facility. A League mission with Clark left him in
the neighborhood, so he dropped in. Everyone in the lab had snapped to
attention, dropped what they were doing, and fawned over him as the head of
the company—everyone except for one chubby fellow who was the last to leave
his station. He kept glancing back to a stack of papers while he
waited for Bruce to make his way down the line. When Bruce reached him
and mentioned that the guy seemed distracted, he looked back at his papers
again and said “Well it’s funny, this one set of numbers doesn’t seem
quite…”

A month later, WayneTech had fourteen patents on Aerogel and a virtual
monopoly manufacturing ultralight materials for space travel.

“Well that’s funny,” Selina had said.

Batman walked over to her workstation and looked over her shoulder rather
than asking her to explain.

“The chess set,” he noted coldly when he saw the screen.

“Yeah, screencap from Barbara’s new feed off their internal circuit.
I zoomed in and cleaned it up a little. Is it me, or does that black
king look like Ra’s?”

Intelligence reports now. Valerina was too ladylike to storm out of
Vulko’s office, but she wasn’t above giving the door a good slam when she
got back to the king’s private office behind the throne room. With
Arthur out of the palace, there was no honor guard stationed there.
With no one at all to hear, she opened the door again and gave it a second
slam.

She should have known this was coming, she really should have. Not
the specifics. Some problem with the satellite, some kind of
“sunspots” making it necessary to cancel the king’s conference with Vulko,
that she couldn’t expect to foresee. But that he would find some
way to dump the intelligence reports on her desk again, that she really
should have seen coming.

It’s not like they were delicate state secrets or anything. That
was clear the first time Arthur sent for her. He wasn’t Arthur back
then; he was “My Liege.” He was more “My Liege” than he had ever been,
because only that morning she’d had to go to his quarters to tell him about
an incoming transmission from the Watchtower while he was still in his
bedchamber. It was only her second time in the king’s private
quarters, and the sight of him walking out of the washroom tying the cord
around is robe had blasted all his instructions out of her head. She
instantly reverted to the “Proper Palace Manners” she’d been taught since
the nursery.

She left almost immediately so he could take his call in private, but he
called her back a few hours later.

“Did you go pier hopping?” he asked casually.

“Sire?” she managed.

“Valerina, isn’t it? You seem young enough. Did you go pier
hopping?”

“Yes, sire, once or twice,” she said with a shy blush.

“I thought so. It’s only the young who take advantage of the new
freedoms. I expected as much. It’s nearly a thousand years since
Orlen I and the Surface Prohibition Decree.” He said the
last words in a gravelly baritone, making it sound absurdly dramatic, and
then laughed like it was a private joke. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure
it was in everyone’s best interests at the time. Surface civilization
circa 1183 was not exactly civilized. But that was then and this is
now, and we can no longer afford to cut ourselves off from the modern world.
So I lifted the ban. I lifted it for the same reason King Orlen made
it, for the surface world’s benefit as well as our own.”

“Sire, why are you telling me this?”

“What did I say about that? Call me Arthur, or at least Orin.”

“Orin,” she said awkwardly, “May I ask why you are telling me this?”

“Because after a thousand years of isolation, I knew it wasn’t going to
happen over night. I knew it would be the young who first took me up
on it. It’s always the young, Valerina, who will adopt a new idea or
hop on board with a new freedom. You seem just about the right age.”

In one sense, she was a little young for what he was saying. The
first wave of pier hoppers was many years ahead of her in school. But
she knew what he meant. In the first years after the ban was lifted,
it was only a nebbish subculture that visited the surface, to try this
substance called “funnel cake”… until they noticed how much their parents
disapproved, and then pier hopping became a right of passage every young
Atlantean had to experience, at least once or twice.

“How many times did you go?” Arthur asked coaxingly.

“Ten times,” she giggled, sharing an embarrassing secret.

“Always the quiet ones,” he laughed, shaking his head.

Selina smiled to herself while Batman raced to his own workstation,
closed all the Atlantis files he had open, and began typing with a savagery
usually reserved for muggers with handguns.

“I remember the first time I saw you do that,” she laughed. “It was
about six months after the masks came off, remember? Ra’s was in
Gotham, fresh out of the pit and completely besotted with Black Canary,
making appearances on talk shows trying to clean up his image.”

“Your point?” Batman growled without slowing his typing.

“I don’t have a point. I just love you and I love watching you do
that.”

“Do what?”

“Overreact. Just because it’s Ra’s al Ghul: light of the East,
terror of the West, ego of egos and narcissist of narcissists. Yea
that none born after Charlemagne can fathom just how in love with himself
this guy is.”

“Selina, he set Bruce Wayne up to be kidnapped. The portrait on
that chessman is no coincidence. Ra’s has to be involved. He has
to have lent it knowing Pequena would want it and would do whatever he had
to in order to get it. He contrived this entire situation—a museum
only you can get into on short notice, lending the pieces for such a short
time—all to set that kidnapping in motion.”

“Like a good chess opening. Yes, Bruce, I agree. I’ll go you
one better. He knows you’re Batman, so he had to know whatever tracer,
fixer, mercenary, or goon Pequena hired would fail. Wait,
scratch that. ‘Fail’ is what happens when some hack from the Gotham
Post tries to break into broadcasting. What Ra’s had to know would
happen with Paquena’s goons is that you would hand them their ass.”

“Agreed. It’s a diversion.”

“Agreed.” This last said with the naughtiest of grins.

“Agreed,” Batman repeated, uneasy at the air of unanimous agreement.
“And I am trying to determine what is happening that Ra’s wants to divert my
attention from, so if you’ll excuse me—”

“Yes, of course you’re going to do that—in a minute. But first,
Bruce, love of my life, stop! You’re already onto him, so take ten
seconds and see the funny. He has a chess set… with a portrait of
himself… as the king. I mean, he didn’t commission this last week,
that thing is hundreds of years old. He had it. It was
laying around someplace, in some dusty guest room in a castle in Mongolia.”

She laughed and Batman scowled.

Selina walked over to his workstation, took his hand, and led him back to
her computer. With the two of them standing before the monitor, she
pointed at the closeup of the chess set’s black king.

Then she looked at Bruce.

“Well?”

He glowered at the screen… the king glowered back… and then…

Batman’s lip twitched.

Twice.

“Good. Meow in fact.” And with that, she bobbed up and kissed
his cheek. “Now we go get him.”

“Impossible woman,” he grumbled (with yet another lip twitch) as he
returned to his workstation.

“My liege, King Orin, sire,” Valerina had teased with a daring she would
not have been capable of moments before, “Am I to understand that you called
me to your quarters just to ask if I had ever been pier hopping? And
you still won’t tell me why?”

“It’s these intelligence reports,” he said, returning to his desk and
pointing at a stack of paper with disdain. “A kingdom as large and
prosperous as Atlantis can’t rely solely on the rest of the world for
information about the rest of the world. It’s called a conflict of
interest. Surface governments, surface media, surface corporations,
it’s like they’re genetically incapable of telling the truth. We need
spies, Valerina. But after a thousand years of isolation, we’re not
very good at it.

“A few years ago, General Phriss had the idea that, if his men couldn’t
infiltrate a fishing village in Norway or a hot spring in Japan, they could
certainly infiltrate a cafe just outside the palace walls. They could
find a few men and women who looked young for their years that could slip
into the schools and the young people’s hangouts, find out where the pier
hoppers have been going and what they’d seen.”

“Yes, sire. The narcs.”

Arthur looked up sharply.

“Thought so. You know about them?”

“Oh yes, sire. Everyone does, they’re very easy to spot when they
come around. Although, I don’t know why they’re called that.
Some sort of silverfish with faulty camouflage?”

“A surface term. Long story. Tell me, when you and your pier
hopping friends identified one of these narcs, did you have a little fun
with them? Tell a few tall tales?”

“Thought as much. That will be all, Valerina. Thank you very
much for your candor.”

Six months later, when she was promoted to the king’s personal aide, she
learned a position had been created shortly after that conversation: the
Minister of Surface Intelligence Evaluation, who would monitor surface media
and crosscheck it against the findings of these pier hopper agents.
Arthur was forever passing his memos on to Valerina for “her take.”

Now he’d sent word through the relay station at Sub Diego that he would
be delayed another day, possibly two (no surprise there, the way this trip
was turning out)… and that, because of these sun spots, he would miss his
scheduled call to Vulko and wanted her to go through the intelligence memos
and give him a quick overview.

Valerina knew that, sun spots aside, any excuse to give her the
intelligence memos instead of Vulko was a good one, as far as Vulko was
concerned. He always complained about Minister Grah and his
increasingly depressed, jaded, and bitter reports.

It began with TiVO. The idea that a flash of nipple could catapult
an entire technology into the mainstream of surface culture was obviously a
pier hopper fiction. Minister Grah spent six weeks trying to determine
how far the hoax went. The nipple incident was clearly a whopper, but what
about this TiVO technology? Did it actually exist? What about
this Super Bowl? What about this Justin Timberlake? Was there
really such a thing as a pasty? The realization that every bit of the
story was real, followed by the dual blow of Simon Cowell and Hot
Pockets… Well, Valerina understood why Vulko no longer wanted to read Grah’s
reports. The progression in the ones she read was striking, from “this
so-called civilization” to “these allegedly civilized beings” to “borderline
sentients” to, finally, “land krill.”

A chess game consists of three distinct phases: the opening, middle, and
end game. In the opening, the goal is to take control of the board and
line up your attack, taking care not to expose your king in the process,
since he is, ironically, the weakest piece on the board…

Bruce often found himself using chess analogies when studying Ra’s al
Ghul. It suited the Demon Head’s meticulous but plodding nature.
The strategies were long range. Intricate and complicated to those who
immersed themselves in studying the game to the exclusion of all else, but
to a casual, more objective observer, they were all variations on the same
two or three standards: Ruy Lopez, Giuoco Piano, King’s or Queen’s Gambit,
declined or accepted. As a metaphor, it suited Ra’s to a tee.

Chess provided a frame, a wire mesh on which to hang the known facts of a
case, providing context. Before long, you saw the connections, the
associations, the patterns beginning to emerge: fund Gregorian Falstaff’s
bids against Wayne Enterprises; pawn to king-4. Send Talia to
assassinate Falstaff, insuring she will meet the Detective; queen’s pawn to
queen-3. Assume Talia will tell the Detective about the operation in
Maccau, since she’s a weak-willed woman who can’t keep her mouth closed
after her lips have been kissed; castle to protect the king which enables
the rook to threaten the bishop, forcing the knight to intervene…

Usually.

In any other Ra’s operation, chess was the key to unlocking his strategy.
But not today. Somehow in using a chess set—an actual, literal chess
set—in his current plan, Ra’s had wrecked the metaphor. A chess set on
the game board. Chessmen as a pawn in a larger strategy. It was
too self-referential. For Mxyzlptk or Riddler, that would be fine.
It might even be helpful. But with Ra’s? No. Ra’s
was simply not that kind of opponent.

“I can feel you seething from way over here,” Selina said mildly.

“It’s not going well,” Batman spat.

“You’ll get him,” she said, unconcerned. “Worst case scenario,
it’ll be dark in a few hours and you can go into Chinatown, shake them up at
the White Dragon.”

“Negative. DEMON takes ‘need to know’ to a new level. Ra’s
seldom tells his own men what’s going on until it’s already happening.
Even those who do ‘need to know’ don’t find out until the last minute, or
are given only a fraction of the information at a time, or—my
favorite—they’re given disinformation, so an individual minion never really
knows if his orders constitute the real plan or if he’s just part of an
elaborate decoy.”

“Luthoresque paranoia without the charm,” Selina smirked.

“Even if none of that were true, I wouldn’t want to question his minions
in Gotham. Right now, Ra’s should believe his diversion is working.
Paquena did try to kidnap Bruce Wayne, and Batman is on the case. As
far as he knows, I don’t suspect a thing about DEMON pulling the strings.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Selina said sadly. “I just saw you
sitting there, boiling, and I thought it would do you good to hit
something.”

“I was thinking of firing up the Strategic Defense Regimen before lunch,”
he admitted.

“Oh Bruce, not Zogger. I’ll fight with you if you want.”

“I don’t,” he graveled. “I don’t want to take the time. I
just want this solved.”

Selina got up from her workstation and positioned herself behind his
chair. She started rubbing his neck, and purring.

“Let’s see the calendar again,” she suggested.

In a flicker, a number of square grids appeared on the main viewscreen,
at an angle, as if floating in space within the monitor. They began
exchanging position, super-imposing over one another, and realigning into
multi-colored matrices.

Selina grinned.

“Is there really somebody at WayneTech that does nothing but think up
pretty graphic displays like that for ‘pull up the calendar?’” she asked
impishly.

It was Bruce’s turn to grin.

“He needs to be replaced, Arthur. I know it’s not my place to say,
but it’s not my place to be reading the intelligence reports in the first
place. If you’ve got me doing the one, you get to put up with me on
the other.”

“After a long vacation,” Valerina suggested. “In his current mood,
I don’t want to go to any party he’s planning.”

…:: Fine, let him take his wife out to Kapheira for a few cycles
before starting his new duties. Warm currents, see the ruins, swim
through the fortress. He’ll come back a new man. But I’m not
ready to replace him yet, Valerina. I hoped the next minister would be
one of your generation, someone who’s actually been up there a few times,
who knows the difference between Rocky Road ice cream and Rolling Stone
magazine. But your generation isn’t old enough yet, and until then, I
can’t see burning through the Grahs like White House press secretaries.::..

“No, we do not. I like to do this thing called sleeping, and
considering the hours around here, that’s more than enough to fill my free
time.”

..:: Arthur Weasley is a character from surface literature. He’s
a wizard who possesses an impish, childlike fascination with the non-magical
world, quite like Bythos and his enthusiasm for surface culture. ::..

“Ah. Well, yeah. And that’s why he’s on the bottom of
the shortlist. Since those people in Sub Diego have been torn away
from their surface lives, it’s probably a sore subject, and his curiosity
could be—”

…:: Intrusive, I agree, but would make him a perfect choice for Grah’s
job. I’ll talk to Vulko.::..

“I really hope you mean you’ll talk to him in person when you get back.”

…:: One more day. ::…

“Arthur, not another delay!”

…:: I’m onto something with the whales. I want to get it up to the
Watchtower for further investigation. The nearest transporter is in
Sydney. ::..

“Oh Arthur.”

…:: Relax, Valerina. From the Watchtower, I can teleport back
instantly. ;;…

It is the nature of a great city to be the crossroads of many worlds:
finance, publishing, fashion, advertising, diamonds, theatre, shipping,
these were but a handful of the fields for which Gotham City was Mecca.
Batman was proud of his city and its people, but this dominance of so many
specialized niches made a comprehensive “calendar of events” a practical
impossibility.

So he downloaded calendars from many organizations: corporations,
universities, chambers of commerce, tourist bureaus, and newspapers, each
listing dozens of events each day with virtually no overlap.

He compiled them into a master document, with data-trails linking back to
the source documents for automatic cross-referencing behind-the-scenes.
In this way, events appealing to a particular rogue’s theme would be
automatically tagged and displayed with greater prominence. It was
this complex sorting and sifting routine that Selina found so amusing,
although what was so funny about a graphical representation of the
software’s subroutines, Bruce found hard to fathom.

“The problem,” he declared flatly, “is that so much goes on in a given
day, in so many of these smaller, self-contained worlds: conventions and
conferences, movie premieres, product launches, book signings and public
appearances. We need some way to narrow it down, but we know nothing
of Ra’s actual scheme except the timing. He lent the chessmen for this
3-week period, provoking the Wayne kidnapping to occur in this week…”
He pointed. “That event was meant to keep me occupied, keep my eye off
something else that is happening somewhere in this timeframe.”

“Okay, what’s that orange one?” Selina pointed.

Batman touched a key, and the shuffling of 3-dimensional data-grids began
anew, until the square with the orange text zoomed to fill the screen.
Once again, Selina smirked.

“An exhibit on the Crusades at Redding College Museum,” Batman read.
“There’s a gold shield embossed with a lion, that might be of interest to
Catman, and a vermeil chalice covered in doves, that might intrigue Oswald.”

“I feel the love,” she said while the screen reset. “Okay then,
hang on, if Catwoman targets aren’t tagged, why is that line purple?”

Once again, Batman zoomed in, exposing details of the event, the source
material from which it was taken, and why it was tagged.

“It’s purple for you, all right,” Batman said with a faint grin, “but not
as a Catwoman target. It’s tagged as having an overlap with recent
searches on your workstation.”

“Paquena?”

“No. E.J. Meadows. Tim’s science symposium. You must
not have logged out last night; he came in and used your terminal.”

“Woof. I thought we were onto something.”

Batman looked thoughtful.

“Maybe we are,” he breathed. “A third of the conference is papers
on bio-fuels. Bio-fuels mean energy independence, which would mean a
huge tip in the balance of global power.”

“That does sound like Ra’s,” Selina said, a soft almost-sexual excitement
in her voice, a predator sensing prey.

“Strategically speaking,” Batman said brusquely, “sixty of the top minds
from around the world in a given field in the same place at the same time.
Kill them, you set that technology back seventy-five years. Take them,
you set the rest of the world back seventy-five years and monopolize the
technology for yourself.”

“You can almost see him drooling,” Selina observed.

“It does sound like a perfect fit for a DEMON operation,” Batman
admitted, but he didn’t trust this haphazard means of identifying a target.
It was nothing but a glorified guess.